I played upright bass. I wanted to write great tunes, play the bass, be a band leader, and smoke a big funny pipe like Charlie Mingus. So I went out and bought the pipe when I was around 18 or 19 years old. You know even women smoke a pipe in Glasgow. I worked with Carla Bley and she smoked a pipe, which I find fascinating.
Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Media and technology are our greatest assets. And yet, they are our most undervalued and underused assets. Now when I say that, people look at me like I'm crazy because every young person we know in the world is never without media, ever.
Whatever Iranian people have bought, they have bought in the black market. It is not clear what they have bought, how many secondhand materials they have bought. I am very worried that something like Chernobyl will happen to Iran.
After all, a bank without assets is hardly a bank at all.
As a matter of fact 25% of our U.S. investment banking business comes out of our commercial bank. So it's a competitive advantage for both the investment bank - which gets a huge volume of business - and the commercial bank because the commercial bank can walk into a company and say, "Oh, if you need X, Y and Z in Japan or China, we can do that for you."
Except for a handful of banks that just keep a handful of their loans in portfolio, on their balance sheet, every other loan that's originated in the United States - whether from a bank, mortgage company, mortgage broker - is sold into the secondary market.
In the media business, the lines are getting blurred between telecom, voice, data, and video, as all are merging into one single pipe. New players have come in, with Jio being a big example.
The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
There's nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.
I am not opposed to the art market. I have lots of friends who are collectors. But the whole idea of the art market is complex. Sadly we have a situation where auction houses and secondary market dealers are creating a lot of confusion and unnecessary pollution.
Housing associations have fingered the fact that they cannot use their assets as liquidity due to Bank of England rules unlike their continental equivalents. This has emerged to be one of the main bottlenecks to getting investment going in the U.K. It is a Bank of England issue.
Even the National Bank of Romania doesn't have the huge resources needed to intervene in the market and keep the leu at an acceptable level, because they're drawing close to a floor below which the bank's reserves can't drop. The central bank has to wait for a moment of calm to efficiently conduct its interventions.
The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.
When I returned to the United States after three years of World War II service, my total assets consisted of one wife, one small daughter, $276 in the bank, and an idea. The idea was for an export business to supply items badly needed everywhere in Europe.